Wow. CA has made some major cuts to its local research and development workforce.
There’s surely going to be some impact to their IAM products as a few notable pieces are developed out of Melbourne such as Identity Manager (parts of it anyway), Directory and SOA Security Manager (did this used to be transaction minder?).
Being ex-ca I know a few of the people affected, so good luck guys and I hope you land on your feet.
ab Uncategorized
For those of us or with clients running Sun Identity Manager, there are 9 vulnerabilities addressed in the latest patch. The affected product versions include:
- Sun Java System Identity Manager 7.0
- Sun Java System Identity Manager 7.1
- Sun Java System Identity Manager 7.1.1
- Sun Java System Identity Manager 8.0
Check the IT News article here and the original Sun Alert here for more information. Happy Patching!
ab Uncategorized
We’re living in interesting times. With share prices at an all time low for many tech giants, its a great time to go company shopping if you’re big and cashed up. I remember the days when Sun IM was the beez neez of provisioning and identity life-cycle management and IBM Tivoli IM still shipped with “broken equals on” (not my quote).
Nowadays, the world of IAM and their vendors is a very different place. If you read reports published by Gartner, Forrester, et al there isn’t a great deal of difference between the different product suites. In fact, having worked with IBM, CA and Sun suites in the past, I’d confirm this from my own experience. IAM is becoming commodity technology.
Just in case you don’t believe me and still believe “<insert product choice here> is the best” the 2008 IAM reports from Gartner show IBM’s Tivoli Access Manager products are only mildly ahead in the Web Access Management Magic Quadrant, while they’re almost neck and neck in the User Provisioning Magic Quadrant.
So if IBM buys Sun, what will they do with the competing product stacks? IBM will have a few options I bet you would never guess:
- Merge the product suites
- Kill some off
- Keep both
Number 3 is the least likely to me (obviously). Could you imagine the cost of supporting multiple code based? This will be even more interesting as the Sun suite is almost entirely open source now as IBM will never be able to truly remove a competing technology. However, owning (at least in principle) both technology suites would make IBM the un-disputed leader in installed IAM technology worldwide. But will that be enough to stop the rise of Oracle?
Anyway, I hope the Sun kit still works after they “blue wash” it. 
ab Identity and Access Management, Uncategorized IBM, sun
I’m sure it’s been around for long a time, but I’ve just come across Sun’s Identity Hero game. This definitely provides a chuckle (unless you’re an auditor or responsible for SOX) . Remember not to run over the “disgruntled employees” without an “Access Management” powerup. You’ll loose a life.
I got to level 6 and only saved my company $6815. No wonder IdM business cases don’t get up.
ab Identity and Access Management, Uncategorized hero, identity, marketing, sun
Thanks to a meeting with a vendor just before Christmas, I recently became aware that there are more open source identity management projects out there than you think (or at least, more than I thought). Some are still in a pretty embryonic stage, but others have been around for a long time. Who knows, we might even need to jury rig a solution if times get tough.
Here’s the list of open source idm projects that I’m actually now aware of:
And of course there is a whole bunch of stuff from Sun.
Has anyone used these successfully? Are there any others I’ve missed?
ab Identity and Access Management, Open Source idm, opensource
This article came across my inbox the other day. Martha (the author) doesn’t really have a security / idm background, according to my (quick, possibly faulty) skim of her LinkedIn profile, so I was interested in her takeaway on security and SaaS and the role of identity in SaaS.
Identity management does get a few mentions (must be a good article), but the main quote I thought worth repeating was:
All of the firms I talked with for this piece referenced Symantec’s research about rogue employees and lost laptops as the primary sources of data loss and theft. Working in the cloud removes the laptop issue and even the smartphone issue.
The wow factor for me (the rest of the article is pretty rushed) is this is the first time I’ve read about cloud computing reducing risk for an organisation, rather than increasing it.
Alas, Martha only hints about identity services in the cloud, and a pretty limited implementation:
User security is rooted in role-based access and identity management. Identity management is maintained in the firm’s LDAP directories. Permissions and denials are controlled by the firm’s administrator. The directories can be either inside the firm’s firewall, at the SaaS provider’s site, or in a DMZ.
Now, if only a large software vendor would release some sort of framework for identity services in the cloud. Should SaaS vendors be looking into this?
ab Cloud Computing cloud, idm, linkedin, risk, SaaS, symantec
Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to be more active online. I’ve been tweeting, facebooking and more recently looking into LinkedIn groups. (I’d put a link here to my LinkedIn profile, but its in serious need of rework).
I’m not sure if you’ve looked into this yourself, but so far I’ve uncovered 6 groups (I’m sure there are more out there - ping me if you’ve got one not on the list). And they are:
My membership is still pending for the “Identity & Access Management” and “League of IAM Architects/Consultants” groups, but the others have some robust discussion at varying levels of technical detail.
And of course, there’s always those people who respond to a discussion by trying to flog their services. I tend to roll my eyes when I see one of those responses. However, one day I’ll probably be one of those people.
ab Collaborate community, groups, identity management, linkedin
After days of toil, we’ve finally got the blog live. Identricity.com covers identity and access management news from Australia and around the world.
Where does the name come from? I think the identity part is clear, but well, there are some ‘eccentricities’ in our industry - minor nuances that anyone involved in IdM/IAM/IM projects in large enterprises can appreciate.
Any questions pr suggestions, feel free to ping me on ab@identricity.com or www.twitter.com/adrianbole. Stay tuned!
admin Identity and Access Management ab, iam, identricity, idm, welcome